Stefan Reichör <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > * It should be possible to use xtla without the need of autoconf > Is this achievable? > What are the drawbacks besides no bytecompiled files? > > * What about users without autoconf (e.g. users on Microsoft Windows)
These pretty much go together. The big benefit that autoconfing an Emacs lisp project is that you can set it up so that the same commands Unix/Linux people know for installing packages (./configure && make && make install) work, and the user gets xtla installed automatically in a site (or optionally personal) directory without necessarily knowing enough about Emacs to do it themselves. The make can automatically byte-compile things, it can locate other emacs lisp libraries it needs, and it can do some level of rough site configuration. With some projects, this is a great thing. For preview-latex, installation included Emacs lisp files and TeX files, each of which had to go in its own locations. We added checks for common misconfiguration errors, and made sure that various external tools we needed (notable ghostscript) were available and worked. This definitely made it much easier for people to get into it. (Later on, developers added a tool written in C, and it was easy to drop into the existing framework.) BBDB and Gnus don't have the same problems with installation directories we had, but have lots of files which need to be compiled in a certain way and conditioned things on the availability of some other Emacs libraries. Windows users are handled in one of two ways. For preview-latex, it used to be recommended that users install MINGW MSYS to run the configure utility. Alternately, instructions are given on how to manually do the byte compiles (often simply by loading a file which byte-compiles everything) and where to put the resultant files. xtla is simple enough that it doesn't _need_ to be autoconf'd, but it would make things somewhat easier, and wouldn't make things any more difficult for Windows users than they are now. -- Alan Shutko <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - I am the rocks. When you shoot a mime, should you use a silencer?
